As well as improving throughput and quality in production lines, a static mixer provides some key advantages for businesses involved in food production, environment monitoring, forensics, production quality control and research by greatly improving the sensitivity and speed of quality and purity analyses and chemical detection operations.
Advances in mixer design mean that the sensitivity and productivity of High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) equipment can be improved substantially by installing relatively inexpensive static mixers. The benefits are in set-up costs, productivity and sensitivity.
Flow Control Set-up
Static mixers can accommodate a range of flows. A single advanced mixer is capable of accommodating flows between 0.1ml per minute and 5ml per minute. In the past, covering that range might typically require setting up five separate mixers and lines rather than just one.
The cost savings from requiring and installing fewer components can be considerable.
Productivity
Because mixing is more efficiently achieved, materials can be passed through more quickly and more tests performed in a given period of time. Obviously, for any business each batch is critical to revenue generation, so faster throughput means reduced labour requirements, less delay and better returns on your equipment investment.
If you buy your static mixers through Statiflo, you can be confident of the durability, efficiency and chemical inertness of your components. Your mixer can be retrofitted to your existing HPLC system, or they can be pre-installed. Their reliability ensures less downtime for cleaning or maintenance, and this too will translate into additional improvements in productivity and confidence in your margins.
Sensitivity
Noise inside the system often obstructs liquid chromatograms from detecting impurities or measuring component chemicals that may be present at only very low levels.
Other than redesigning lines completely, installation of well-designed components with friction-free coatings like Teflon helps to achieve the highest possible levels of mixing with the greatest reductions in baseline noise and ripple.
The improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio achieved can be as high as 90% in many systems, and this translates into much lower detection limits.
Efficient components also mean that lower system dwell is needed, so you can achieve better phase mixing with a lower internal volume. It’s often easier to achieve a cleaner signal with these lower volumes, obtaining improved quantitation and therefore reducing the time needed for each test run even further.